On Wednesday, participants engaged in three plenary panels on: fisheries and aquaculture: sustainability and governance; halting loss of biodiversity and establishing representative networks of marine protected areas (MPAs); and oceans and climate. In the second part of the afternoon, participants broke into thirteen discussion sessions.

Lorraine Ridgeway, Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Canada, called for accelerated progress and suggested that failure to conserve tuna would translate to a credibility loss for the fisheries governance system.

Moritaka Hayashi, Ocean Policy Research Foundation, Japan, and former Assistant Director-General,UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), welcomed the increasing link between regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) and global institutions, such as the UNGA and the FAO’s Committee on Fisheries.

James Hardcastle, Senior Conservation Finance and Policy Advisor, Asia-Pacific, The Nature Conservancy, outlined lessons learned from the Micronesia Challenge, including the need to build on existing conservation programmes and for the full involvement of communities.

Kenneth Sherman, GEF Large Marine Ecosystem (LME) Programme and US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, described a five module strategy, based on lessons learned from LME case studies, to provide science-based information for the monitoring, assessment and management of LMEs.

Paul Epstein, Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard University Medical School, gave examples of the consequences of global warming on public health.